Without climate change, these extreme weather events would not have happened

Droughts, storms, wildfires and heat waves: Extreme weather around the world is becoming more intense and more frequent. The toll is huge and mounting, with lives lost, homes destroyed, livelihoods stolen and economies upended.

Droughts, storms, wildfires and heat waves: Extreme weather around the world is becoming more intense and more frequent. The toll is huge and mounting, with lives lost, homes destroyed, livelihoods stolen and economies upended.

The extreme events are happening against the backdrop of a very fast-warming climate. The world is already 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in preindustrial times, and the next five years are predicted to be the hottest on record.

People often want to know if an extreme weather event happened because of climate change, said Friederike Otto, climate scientist and co-lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative.

But it is not a simple question. “You can’t answer this with yes or no,” she told journalists at a briefing last week. It is because climate change alters the likelihood and intensity of extreme events, she said.

Otto and other scientists are using a scientific technique to transform our understanding of how this dynamic plays out. And, more often than not, they are finding the clear fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather events.

Called “attribution,” the method involves analyzing real-world observations as well as climate models to establish whether a particular extreme event could have happened in a world without global heating.

While attribution studies are not done for every extreme weather event, they help bring home the realities of the direct and immediate damage the climate crisis is doing to people’s lives, which scientists say will only get worse if the world continues to pump out planet-warming pollution.